Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular Music

JAZZ

An American art form originating c. 1900, characterized by improvisation and self-expression through the music; the performer is the composer, and a troubadour. Jazz was the third popular musical form (after Minstrelsy and Ragtime) to come largely from African-Americans to international success. The word was also spelled 'jass'; some think it came from the French jaser (to talk, perhaps indiscreetly); attempts to trace it back to Africa have been inconclusive. It was used in print as early as 1909 in reference to dancing, in 1913 about US Army musicians 'trained on ragtime and ''jazz'' ' (Oxford English Dictionary Supplement). Clarence Williams claimed to be first to use the word on sheet music c.1915, describing 'Brown Skin, Who You For?' as 'Jazz Song': 'I don't exactly remember where the words came from, but I heard a lady say it to me when we were playin' some music. ''Oh, jazz me, Baby,'' she said.' The word was credited with a sexual connotation; song titles such as 'Jazz Me Blues', 'Jazzin' Babies Blues' were common.

Jazz conquered the world and remains at the root of 20th-century popular music; it has evolved, as any art form will, encountering resistance every step of the way, and every aspect of its history gives rise to argument because of racial, political, musical and academic egos to be stroked. It is not true that it was not taken seriously in the USA; James Lincoln Collier has uncovered a great many serious articles on the subject published there in the 1920s. (But it is true that most Americans took jazz for granted; it was their music.) Great black jazzmen did not get the recognition or the money they deserved because of racism, but it is not true that jazz was suppressed commercially; white businessmen hired the great black practitioners to play for enthusiastic white audiences as soon as the music began to spread across the country, while theories to the contrary were cooked up by the American left, which tried to co-opt jazz (as it did folk music) as a music of the oppressed for political reasons (but nobody paid much attention, and Sidney Finkelstein, a communist, wrote a very good book on jazz, free of political cant). In fact contemporary development of recording and broadcasting technology meant that jazz belonged for ever to its greatest practitioners. After WWII broadcasting in the USA was turned over almost entirely to accountants interested only in easy money, the pop charts and radio playlists stimulating each other, and many Americans nowadays never hear any jazz, yet it remains popular around the world. Attempts to water it down have sometimes been commercially successful in the short term, but always withered away; the word has been used to describe any jazz-influenced popular music, from Paul Whiteman as the 'King of Jazz' to the jazz rock, jazz funk, acid jazz etc of recent times, and now has so many derogatory connotations that many young musicians today will not use it. Many now call it 'improvised music', an irony perhaps: improvised music has always been with us (indeed, seems to be necessary to us), which is how jazz came to evolve.

[We take for granted a connection with Africa, though it is not easy to establish; the Swedish scholar and musician Gunnar Lindgren postulates a connection with the Arab cultures of North Africa. His tantalizing essay is here.]

Early jazz was not confined to saloons and brothels in New Orleans; it was played outdoors and at parties and dances. Many of the early jazz musicians probably thought they were playing ragtime, and played it the way they did because it was popular and they wanted to make a living at it. (This is of course a double-edged sword: tension between commercial and artistic goals has been present since the beginning.) Jazz was quickly played all over America, but the traditional up-the-river from New Orleans approach is not a bad one: the musicians followed the jobs, while New Orleans was the most important incubator because of its location. But while it is interesting to note that the Streckfus line, the largest operator of the excursion riverboats, liked to hire black musicians exclusively, people emigrating from New Orleans looking for work would not have used the riverboats: trains were faster and cheaper.

Such evidence as there is suggests that the earliest practitioners and their audiences were black, but blacks and whites were soon involved together, learning from each other; there have been countless fine white jazz musicians, particularly among Italians and Jews, and unlike the blues, jazz was never a folk music, having a strong European element from the beginning (as did ragtime). Yet the African heritage was important. Black Americans had retained an astonishing amount of their African heritage for 300 years because slaves could not fully take part in American culture, while Louisiana slave-owners were French-speaking Catholics rather than Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and didn't forbid slaves to play music and dance as strictly as others did.

The early development of jazz was probably similar to that of the blues, including the call-and-response patterns of work songs, and 'blue' notes (not found in the diatonic scale, but replacing the third and the seventh notes of that scale); these and other elements such as improvisation, polyphony, rhythmic freedom, and the attitude towards making music as a social activity are still ubiquitous in African music. Yet the formal or European element in jazz was present precisely because it is not true that most early jazzmen were musically illiterate: most could read music and many were formally trained. The most innovative soloists, advancing the music's stylistic frontier, were nearly all black, at least until after WWII; but arrangers and composers soon became important, and a significant number of the best were white (while Duke Ellington, the greatest of all, was black). Since WWII Lennie Tristano, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Steve Lacy and many other whites have been as influential as anyone; and the musicians have always listened to and appreciated one another: both Jim Crow and Crow Jim are the preserve of the musically ignorant.

As a seaport New Orleans was host to musical influences from all over the Caribbean, including Irish and Spanish 'tinges'; the entertainers had to make a living, so Tin Pan Alley's popular songs of the day were thrown into the stew; ragtime, a formal music but emphasizing syncopation, was a final ingredient. Every town in the USA had a local brass band, but New Orleans had them in every neighbourhood; there is even a theory that the demobilization of troops in New Orleans after the Spanish-American War made musical instruments easier to obtain. Ragtime music as it was printed was sometimes badly edited by publishers; many musicians accused of 'faking it' were in fact improvising. The musical influence was two-way in more ways than one: the self-taught wanted to learn to play 'straight', while musicians in marching and concert bands were proud of their ability to read and to play either straight or 'ragtime', using crying tones, slurred notes and so on (the early 'Fidgety Feet' was a syncopated march). Pre-WWI New Orleans was relatively easy-going racially, though there was hierarchy of colour, Creoles having pretensions and blacks always the poorest; an alderman called Story set aside a neighbourhood for brothels and gambling in 1897 (the District, or Storyville); during WWI it was closed by order of the US Navy, but it is now thought that not many musicians worked there anyway.

Pianist/vocalist Tony Jackson (b 5 June 1876; d 20 April 1921, Chicago; he wrote 'Pretty Baby') and cornettists Buddy Bolden, who never recorded, and Freddie Keppard, who recorded very little, were among the first players of jazz; Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented it in 1902. Alan Philip Jaffe (b 1936; d 9 March 1987) established Preservation Hall in the early 1960s as a venue for New Orleans old-timers; Kid Thomas Valentine (d 16 June 1987 aged 91) was one of the last. [Bassist Walter Payton, father of trumpeter Nicholas Payton, and a teacher whose students included Jaffe, anchored the Preservation Hall band more recently; he died 29 October 2010 aged 68.]

Early jazz history was confused by the fact that first jazz records (made in early 1917 in NYC) were by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, white men from New Orleans. Spike's Seven Pods of Pepper, with Kid Ory and cornettist Thomas 'Papa Mutt' Carey (b 1891, Hahnville LA; d 3 September 1948) recorded in L.A. in 1922, but what came to be regarded as the classic style was recorded by King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band 1923-4: 24 sides and two alternate takes were made in Chicago and Richmond IN by a New Orleans lineup with Oliver's lead cornet, Louis Armstrong on second cornet, clarinet, trombone, piano, banjo and drums (the acoustic recording process restricting Baby Dodds to his woodblocks): the 'front line' played a collective improvisation, with everybody listening to everybody else, to make an improvised counterpoint. Morton's piano solos were recorded '23; the Red Onion Jazz Babies recorded '24, a quintet with Armstrong, reedmen Buster Bailey and Sidney Bechet and vocals by Alberta Hunter; Clarence Williams's Blue Five '23 made similar classics with his wife Eva Taylor singing, Armstrong, Bechet, Charlie Irvis on trombone, Williams instead of Lil Armstrong on piano: we cannot know what jazz may have sounded like ten years earlier, but these records are the best example we have of how the bands may have played in the bars and dance halls of New Orleans. The Friars' Society Orchestra recorded in 1922 and changed its name to the New Orleans Rhythm Kings; this white Chicago group included Paul Mares (1900-49) on trumpet, clarinettist Leon Roppolo (b 16 March 1902, Louisiana; d there 14 October 1943), Georg Brunis on trombone (later with Muggsy Spanier's Ragtimers) and drummer Ben Pollack; Morton recorded with them in 1923, making it perhaps the earliest interracial group. As a group the NORK were not as famous as the ODJB but they may have been more influential, because Mares and especially Roppolo were better musicians, and as a group they were more influenced by black music and had a more relaxed swing.

Louis Armstrong began his series of Hot Fives and Hot Sevens using the electric recording process in 1925, instantly setting soloists free from the strictures of the classic style, becoming the first and still one of the greatest soloists in recording history: music was permanently changed as musicians all over the country heard these records. Young white players in Chicago soon became a new generation of musicians taking blacks as their models; they had white heroes as well, such as Roppolo, but they imitated their black heroes, clarinettist Jimmie Noone as well as those already mentioned, and invented a free-wheeling 'Chicago style', with solos between ensemble passages. They included the Austin High Gang, so called because some attended Austin High School (Frank Teschemacher, Jimmy and Dick McPartland, Bud Freeman); also Eddie Condon, Red McKenzie, Joe Sullivan, Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman etc; the Chicago style was documented on records as early as 1927 by McKenzie and Condon's Chicagoans and others. Armstrong was a Chicago cabaret star in the late '20s; Morton recorded there with his Red Hot Peppers; the black popular culture scene, then close to the Loop, is affectionately described in Dempsey J. Travis's An Autobiography Of Black Jazz (1983). Bix Beiderbecke first recorded in 1924; his pure, beautiful tone and melodic improvising had almost as great an influence as Armstrong. Morton and Oliver went to NYC in the late 1920s and made beautiful records, but their style was already considered old-fashioned and the move was the beginning of their decline.

Clarence Williams was one of the first New Orleans musicians to influence music in NYC, where Luckey Roberts, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Willie 'The Lion' Smith and many others played 'stride' piano, a two-fisted style built on ragtime emphasizing tenths in the bass (though the unclassifiable Art Tatum, from the Midwest, became the greatest jazz pianist of all). Also in NYC, Fletcher Henderson's arranger Don Redman (inspired by Armstrong's brief stay in the band) and Duke Ellington (similarly inspired by gigs with Bechet, later by the Oliver-inspired trumpet of Bubber Miley) began to invent jazz composition for larger groups; in the Detroit area, Jean Goldkette with his own band and those he started or managed (the black McKinney's Cotton Pickers, the white Casa Loma Band) were also playing a jazz-oriented dance-band style. The Big Band Era was touched off in 1935 by the sudden huge commercial success of Goodman playing arrangements by Henderson and others, and for 15 years a jazz-based style dominated big-time popular music for the only period in the history of jazz. Meanwhile, territory bands played all over the country: Troy Floyd's eleven-piece band played the Plaza Hotel in San Antonio and included Herschel Evans (see Count Basie), one of dozens of fine tenors to come from Texas; Roy Johnson and his Happy Pals included Jack Teagarden at one time, as did Peck's Bad Boys in Texas; the band of Alphonso Trent (b 24 August 1905, AR; d there 14 October 1959) included James Jeter and Hayes Pillars (later co-leaders of their own band), Stuff Smith, Harry Edison etc; Jimmy Blanton and Charlie Christian scuffled in the provinces. Redman was hired by Goldkette as music director of the Cotton Pickers; the Blue Devils, led by Walter Page, melded into the most prolific of territory bands, that of Benny Moten, whose 'western swing' was admired in the East (while jazz also influenced a style of big-band country music, also called western swing). At the height of the Swing Era (as the Big Band Era was also called) the hothouse of Kansas City jazz exploded: Count Basie came East with a looser, powerfully swinging blues-based big-band style, and re-injected some basic values, its rhythm section completing the smoothing out of New Orleans 2/4 into 4/4, paving the way for later developments. Boogie woogie, the southern blues piano style, was a fad in the '40s.

Coleman Hawkins in Henderson's band had invented the tenor saxophone as a jazz instrument, with Ben Webster his principal acolyte. Basie's Lester Young presented an alternative, playing a higher, lighter, 'cooler' sound, as though on alto, and improvising in a melodic, linear style rather than a chromatic one. Billie Holiday was Young's soulmate, lyrical and deceptively laconic, one of the most influential of jazz singers (but see also Ethel Waters, Mildred Bailey, Connee Boswell). The Kansas City band of Jay McShann included Charlie Parker; he gathered with Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Bud Powell and others in NYC and as the Swing Era began to decay a new generation of black artists created bop 1940-5, a controversial development at the time. After WWII the big bands of Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, Boyd Raeburn and Ray McKinley were playing up-to-date music, but big bands were no longer economically viable (although these bands were white, not even they could make a living on the road). The big-band style passed into repertory along with the New Orleans style, just as the latter was being re-created by the revival movement in the 1940s, most prominently on the West Coast by Lu Watters, Bob Scobey and Turk Murphy. The legendary Bunk Johnson was rediscovered and recorded; through the 1950s middle-aged white men (and remnants of the Chicago school included many fine players) played neo-New Orleans Dixieland. (Bunk Johnson's records disappointed some people partly because they did not sound like the King Oliver band of 1924: New Orleans' music had not stood still for 20 years.)

The 'mouldy figs' had never accepted big-band music as jazz; bop gave them apoplexy: it was commercially unsuccessful (despite the personal popularity of Gillespie) and jazz has had a lower profile in the marketplace ever since. But bop was an exciting and necessary step towards freedom for a new generation of artists, cooling off into 'modern' or 'progressive' jazz. The 'cool' progressive school was largely West Coast and white; reedman Dave Pell (b 26 February 1925, Brooklyn) formed an octet '55 out of the Les Brown band, and his music was so cool and white it was washed out, but he was frank about playing 'mortgage-paying music'. Dave Brubeck was considerably more interesting at the time, the most commercially successful jazzman of the 1950s by a long way; great records were made by Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Art Pepper and others, who stayed the course to become giants in their own right, while the underrated West Coast black scene included Elmo Hope, Carl Perkins, Curtis Counce, Hampton Hawes and many others (Jazz West Coast 1986 by Robert Gordon is good on this era). Among other white musicians of the 1950s, Tristano, Red Rodney, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh (the latter two Tristano pupils) and many others were consistently admired. On the East Coast the Blue Note and Prestige labels carried the can in the 1950s, recording 'blowing sessions': the tenor sax was king as Sonny Rollins, Johnny Griffin, Hank Mobley, Sonny Stitt, Tina Brooks, John Coltrane, Gene Ammons and Dexter Gordon held sway, taking up where the 'swingtets' of John Hardee and Ike Quebec had left off in the late '40s (though Quebec came back with a series of beautiful LPs in the 1960s). Thelonious Monk was a unique composer of challenging themes, as was Herbie Nichols a little later; both were shamefully neglected in the mid-1950s. The arranger/ composer again came to the fore, Ellington still the godfather; Tadd Dameron, Gil Fuller, Gil Evans, George Russell, Mal Waldron, Johnny Richards, Bill Holman, Jimmy Giuffre, Shorty Rogers, Pete Rugolo and other composers/ arrangers contributed beauty. The distinctive, volatile genius of Charles Mingus shaped many fine musicians, including Eric Dolphy; Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers turned out scores of stars and set the pace for Blue Note, whose output became more and more funky (giving rise to modern terms jazz-funk, disco-funk etc).

Miles Davis's Quintet of 1954-6 included Coltrane and followed a modal trail blazed by Russell's textbook; Coltrane's quartet formed '60 became the most successful group of the new decade, while Ornette Coleman was probably more influential, leading the way to 'free jazz': the new avant-garde in black music included Albert Ayler, Charles Lloyd, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra; despite the dominance of rock in the 1960s it was once again hip to buy jazz records. ESP Disc in NYC, formed by lawyer Bernard Stollman (d 19 April 2015, aged 85), recorded some of the newest music from 1964 (ESP albums were in and out of print, but had been leased to a German company and were all or mostly on CD in the mid-1990s). The 'October Revolution' was a series of concerts at NYC's Cellar Café in 1964; Dixon formed the Jazz Composers' Guild with Carla and Paul Bley and others; it failed, but led to JCOA (Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association), formed by Carla and Mike Mantler for publishing and recording, beginning with the album JCOA in 1968 of Mantler's music played by a large orchestra with Taylor, Sanders, Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd, Steve Lacy and many others, continuing with albums by Bley, Cherry, Charlie Haden, etc. Chicago again became a hive of seminal activity: local tenors Fred Anderson and Von Freeman had remained faithful to themselves for little commercial reward, but the AACM was formed in 1965 and guru Richard Abrams graduated the Art Ensemble of Chicago (a quintet), Air (a trio) and many others: musicians took charge of their music, found their own venues, put out their own records on local labels Delmark and Nessa, and in general took the music back to the community whence it came. The Jazz and People's Movement interrupted taping of the Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson talk shows in NYC late in 1970 (thus hitting all three networks) to ask why more black music was not heard on TV; an all-star group led by Roland Kirk appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show partly as a result (Kirk asked Sullivan why he never had Coltrane on his show; Sullivan asked, 'Does John Coltrane have any records out?'). Frank Lowe, Charles Tyler, Leo Smith, Julius Hemphill, Bobby Bradford, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill and Anthony Braxton were a few of the composer/ leaders coming to the fore in the 1970s.

The new music was often called 'free jazz', but it was of course not 'free' at all; experiments of the 1960s that tried to do away entirely with form remained obscure, and structure became another tool in the composer's kit: bop had changed the rhythmic nature of jazz, but still tied players to a number of beats in a measure; classic New Orleans jazz hadn't remained tied to European harmony, but the boppers had tied themselves to chord structures; now free jazz (or 'improvised music' or just 'the music') liberated harmony and rhythm and recovered collective improvisation. The celebratory Wildflowers Festival NYC in 1976 resulted in five albums on Douglas produced by Michael Cuscuna, with contributions from Leo Smith, Braxton, Hemphill, Hamiet Bluiett, Randy Weston, Sam Rivers, Jimmy Lyons, Andrew Cyrille, Sunny Murray, Air and several others.

After the furious innovation of the 1960s and '70s, jazz was more a repertory music than ever, as musicians concentrated on writing and playing their best, refusing to follow trends or accept labels: Sun Ra's Arkestra was apt to break out with Henderson's 'Big John Special' in concert; the Art Ensemble's act and Threadgill's combos included elements of New Orleans street bands and much else; the Dirty Dozen Jazz Band updated the New Orleans front line; Scott Hamilton played tenor in the style of the soloists of the Swing Era. Many younger players in the 1980s could be described as revivalists, in the same way that Brahms was technically a 'classical' composer, neither extending the forms nor bursting free of them; in jazz there was a lot of talk about 'the tradition', which some said was a crutch; the Art Ensemble got its inspiration from the tradition, but didn't have to talk about it. Bobby Watson, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard and Donald Harrison were among the latest graduates of Blakey's academy; but drummer Keith Copeland, leader/reedman/composer Chico Freeman (Von's son), guitarist Rory Stuart and many other younger players could play 'inside' or 'outside'. On the frontier, Chicago's venerable Hal Russell and his young white NRG Ensemble played sharp, biting, witty music (the band kept going for a while after Russell's death); reedmen David Murray, John Carter and Threadgill led exciting ensembles, and Chicago's Edward Wilkerson began recording in the late '80s. Ironically, as the word fell into disuse among musicians jazz was a more international music than in earlier decades, when eclecticism was too self-conscious; before WWII Django Reinhardt was the only European jazzman to gain an international reputation; afterwards Lars Gullin on baritone sax, Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone, composer André Hodeir, pianists Adam Makowicz and Martial Solal, reedmen Tony Coe and Peter King were all world-class. In the UK veterans Harry Beckett, Brian Lemon and many others were playing better than ever, avant-gardists Evan Parker, Trevor Watts and others were gathering international reputations, while Bill Ashton's National Youth Jazz Orchestra found young players of amazing virtuosity. The Vienna Art Orchestra of Mathias Rüegg, the Willem Breuker Kollektief in Amsterdam, the Pipetet of Franz Koglmann in Switzerland and the USSR's Ganelin Trio blazed their own trails, but the 'third stream' music of Hodeir, Gunther Schuller, John Lewis and others has not had a fair hearing because there is no money to keep larger groups together to play the music.

The studied Romanticism of New Age music is sometimes jazz-influenced; neither this nor jazz-rock fusion was accepted by critics and fans of the real thing, despite the commercial success of scores of albums by Keith Jarrett, Larry Coryell, Chick Corea (especially Return to Forever), Weather Report etc; others taking up various aspects of fusion included Barbara Thompson, Bill Bruford and Bill Laswell, but fusion inevitably seemed to rely on electronics and leftover pop licks. Commercial jazz 'revivals' come and go; the music of Spyro Gyra, Chuck Mangione, Lee Ritenour, Grover Washington Jr etc was easy-listening music, alcohol-free beer compared to Czech Pilsner, and there's nothing wrong with that; but the more intense and stimulating music of Edward Wilkerson, Henry Threadgill, Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, Marilyn Crispell, Myra Melford, Reggie Workman etc was far more rewarding, while Anthony Braxton's career became one of the best-documented in the music's history.

One of the most promising developments of the late 1980s and '90s was the tendency of composer-leaders towards unconventional lineups, such as those of Lacy, Threadgill, Wilkerson and Buell Neidlinger; while Maria Schneider, like her mentor Gil Evans, used a conventional big-band lineup in unconventional ways. Saxophonist Ted Brown in a trio without a drummer; drummer Keith Copeland in Larry Schneider's trio without a keyboard; Ruby Braff, Brian Lemon, Warren Vaché, Howard Alden and others recording in duos and trios were listening closely to one another and making intimate music of endless interest: this was being documented in Concord's new duo series, on the enterprising new UK Zephyr label, and on the more avant-garde side on CIMP (Creative Music Improvised Projects), where reedmen Frank Lowe, Bobby Zankel, Billy Pierce, Mark Whitecage and others were making unique music. If in the 1970s and '80s many of the younger players had seemed to depend on a warmed-over post-bop wine-bar music, in the '90s a new generation was more eclectic, musicians playing anything they liked with a renewed freedom. There were more real jazz records available than ever in the CD era (new and reissued), new jazz labels emerging in each decade (Spotlite, Nessa, hat Art, ECM, Cadence, Concord, Hep, Discovery, Evidence, Fresh Sound, FMP, Okka etc) while major labels chased ever-more elusive customers in rock and pop. The improvised music scene was on the Internet: for example, PortAudio was an online mail order system for CD labels including the Chicago Improvisers Collation, EDM (Eighth Day Music) and Okkadisc, and giants like Benny Carter and Anthony Braxton had their own web pages.

The jazz bibliography is huge: in France, Hugues Panassié wrote Le Jazz Hot '34, devoting too much space to white jazzmen; in The Real Jazz '42 he corrected himself, but with the advent of bop he split with long-time collaborator Charles Delaunay and stayed in the New Orleans camp: Europe had its mouldy figs, too. In the USA New Yorker critic Winthrop Sargeant's Jazz: Hot And Hybrid and journalist Wilder Hobson's American Jazz Music were the first book-length treatments in the late '30s; Otis Ferguson wrote in The New Republic '36-41; Frederick Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith compiled and edited Jazzmen '39, preserving many of the best stories and legends in amber; Finkelstein's Jazz: A People's Music came '48, and the floodgates have been open ever since. Some of the best research on the earliest years of jazz can be found in R. Collins's New Orleans Jazz: A Revised History '96. See entries for Gunther Schuller and André Hodeir; Joachim Berendt's The Jazz Book (several editions) also has a musician's understanding of the music. Hear Me Talkin' To Ya '55 is 'The story of jazz as told by the men who made it', compiled by Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro (sometimes carelessly handling its sources); Ira Gitler's oral history Swing To Bop '85 and his Jazz Masters Of The 40s '66 are excellent on that era; see Stanley Dance for more oral histories. Ross Russell's Jazz Style In Kansas City And The Southwest '71 is unique and valuable, especially in later, corrected editions. A. B. Spellman's Black Music: Four Lives '66 was an early classic on the avant-garde; Valerie Wilmer's As Serious As Your Life '77 is full of the social aspect and John Litweiler's The Freedom Principle '84 is full of love for the music, sending the reader to the record shelf. Books, articles, sleeve notes and collections by Martin Williams, Gary Giddins, Chicago journalist J. B. Figi and Francis Davis will repay study; Robert Gottlieb's Reading Jazz '97 is a good compendium; it is to be regretted that Max Harrison's only published collection is A Jazz Retrospect '76 (reprinted '91). New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett defined jazz as 'the sound of surprise'; his American Musicians: 56 Portraits In Jazz '86 collects valuable profiles, most including interviews and anecdotes. Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz '97 was a new summary; Alyn Shipton's A New History Of Jazz (2001) was immensely readable and to the point; Richard M. Sudhalter's Lost Chords: White Musicians And Their Contribution to Jazz 1915-1945 (1999) was an astonishing tour-de-force of scholarship, the definitive work on that subject. Bruce Raeburn's book New Orleans Style And The Writing Of American Jazz History (2009) deals with many of the problems of jazz historiography, including politics and the myth that the early jazzmen were illiterate. Cadence magazine carried interviews with musicians and more record reviews than any other. See also entries for Big Band Era, Boogie Woogie, Bop, Kansas City Jazz and Swing in Music.